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"What a wonderful book", I kept saying to myself once I'd got into Nada, and it maintained its gorgeous gothic atmosphere for the rest of the novel. Don't judge it on the first two or three clunky pages - it takes a short while to find its feet, but soon becomes impressively sure of them.

There's something very contemporary in its main themes, but it feels fresher and freer in the way it approaches them, because it is untrammelled by current buzzwords and tropes. (It was written 75 years ago, and re-translated by the eminent Edith Grossman in 2007.)

The 18-year-old narrator Andrea, arriving in Barcelona for university, comes to stay in a ramshackle building with eccentric relatives who appear part Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, part House of Bernarda Alba. At first, the way she describes them - and almost everything - may teeter towards melodrama, but as the story gets into its swing, it is artfully sustained, becoming a full and bewitching style to be marvelled at.

Unlike countless novels about enchanting households full of artistic eccentrics, this one does not shy away from, or make light of, the full darkness that too often, in reality, afflicts such places - perhaps thanks to Laforet's adoption of the tremendismo style of the time, which emphasised grotesquerie. Here, rages are frightening, not amusing (N.B. there is a lot of severe domestic violence in this novel, mostly from one uncle towards his wife), sleaziness is treated as worrying, and the Inquisitional Catholic severity of Aunt Angustias made me feel an almost physical pressure. With days spent hungry and living in a chaotic home, this poverty is not genteel or cosy, unlike the girls of I Capture the Castle. Yet the magical prose simultaneously shows that Andrea's first year in Barcelona was a remarkable time in her life, and makes it evident why her new friend, Ena - beautiful, charismatic, from a prosperous background, and who once seemed ethereally unattainable to Andrea - might be fascinated by Andrea's family, although Andrea repeatedly tries to convince her that they are horrible.

The handling of perspectives and fascinations is beautifully done: through Andrea's anxieties and poverty, and her perceptions of her appearance as, at best, indifferent, there are artless glimpses of why students like Ena, and a group of rich bohemian artist boys, would invite her to hang out with them. (The boys are amusingly similar to caricature 2010s trust-fund hipsters, a parallel which - given the novel's political subtext of capturing the stifling conditions of the early Franco years - can be related to social inequality, as it has again in the last ten years become increasingly difficult for those without money or connections to get into the arts. Andrea has the connections and education but not the cash, a symbol of the downwardly-mobile middle classes.) Andrea's narrative is redolent with the possibilities and drama of early undergraduate years, but also the wise self-awareness of an older woman - seemingly older than her mid-twenties - looking back. (Laforet was 23 when she wrote Nada.)

Andrea is already very self-assured in some ways, not least her matter-of-fact determination, in the face of the fearsome propriety and scaremongering of her aunt, to explore the city alone on her own terms - something I would have found highly relatable in my own teens. So one suspects that when Andrea is older, she will have the epiphany, "gosh, yes actually, I *am* interesting", and become more confident. But there's something likeable and endearing about her being as she is, here. And in common with trends in recently-written female characters, her imperfections are also unabashedly on show: her moments of judgemental pique, and - something I found very comforting - occasions when she finds she can't say the right thing and keeps getting on the wrong side of people. Both Andrea and Ena have a sense of inner life, ego and personal destiny in which boyfriends are occasional, often marginal interests; they can sometimes sound more like male literary protagonists of their era. (It was gratifying yet not altogether surprising to hear that there have been academic papers on gender inversion in the novel, and suggesting that Andrea and Ena are 'androgynous beings'.)

The book is marked by the seasons, including the cold, which many northern Europeans may not associate with Spain. It conjures memories of one's own university years, with the social and academic cycles heralded by changing weather. Having not read nearly enough Spanish literature myself before, it was right to be made to think of the place in all temperatures:
After lunch I sat huddled in my chair, my feet in large felt slippers, next to my grandmother's brazier. I listened to the sound of the rain. With their force the streams of water were cleaning the dust from the windows to the balcony. At first they had formed a sticky layer of grime; now the drops slid freely along the shiny gray surface. I didn't want to move or do anything
And to be made to consider Barcelona in detail, which, oddly, because of the sense of responsibility towards two languages, not just one, I had not really done before... The idea of it feels more tiring, although I'm not sure that will make sense to anyone else.

As in newer novels about female friendship, like Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, it is Andrea's relationship with Ena that is ultimately at the centre of the book:
All the gardens in Bonanova were filled with flowers and their beauty gripped my spirit, which was already too full. I also seemed to be overflowing � as the lilacs, the bougainvillea, the honeysuckle, overflowed the garden walls � so great was the affection, the anguished fear I felt for the life and dreams of my friend. Perhaps in the entire story of our friendship I had not experienced moments as beautiful and as childish as the ones I felt during that useless excursion past gardens on a radiant Saint John's morning.
This, like its understanding that the 'artistic temperament' can, when it gets out of hand, be abusive, makes Nada seem very 'now'.

I discovered Nada because, as a way of finding out about shorter classics from other language traditions, I looked through set texts in current A-level foreign language syllabuses. Nada would have been an even more wonderful book to read at 16-18, and I hope that some of the teenagers who study it bond with it as much as I did with U.A. Fanthorpe's poetry at their age, poems which stayed with me and informed my tastes ever since. (It is also one of the '1001 Books to Read Before You Die' - and I for one am very glad I did.)

In the last few months, I've said a few times that I'm not terribly interested in reading fiction about characters in their teens and early twenties. However, Nada proved an exception due to the beauty of the writing (the opposite of Sally Rooney's mundane minimalism), and its adroit combination of enchanting atmosphere with grounded self-awareness and critique of the things that create that very ambience. This was also the first non-audio book, and the first fiction book I've read since January which was not eligible or listed for a 2019 award, and it proved a very good choice.

(Apologies for not including more quotes. It would have been easier to include none, as there are so many beautiful ones it would take hours to choose the very best; those here are somewhat random.)